Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (2 page)

“
Seriously
. What. The fuck. Was that.”

Sophie thought about it. As she thought, a taste arranged itself on her tongue. The luscious bite of the brine gone, she tasted—well, tastes she'd never tasted before, and probably wasn't supposed to taste in the first place. Like sucking on the spoke of a rusty wheel, or the gelatinous plastic of a bag of drowned kittens. Grit crunched beneath her teeth, releasing a chemical that made her gums back away from her teeth.
She spit away a shard of glass that had cut into the roof of her mouth, startling at the phlegmy blood that spattered on the dead grass. Ella shrieked and lit a brand new cigarette. For the first time ever, Sophie wished that she smoked. Even that burnt stink would be better than this. She thought of the times her mother had waved a hand across her face, saying
Brush your teeth, it smells like something died in your mouth
— well, now something had, a whole bunch of terrible something.

“Was that a cry for help? Are you, like, suicidal or fake-suicidal or however that works and you want me to, like, notice and tell your mother?” Ella released a balloon of pungent smoke into the air and Sophie tried not to gasp after it, desperate. The tingle had totally left her body, the sweet feelings of the pass-out game were gone. She was gross with creek water and horrified at what she'd done.

“I… I don't know,” Sophie stuttered. Ella pulled a wide cloth headband from her brow. Her hair, sleek and black as a clean creek at midnight, spilled across her face, stray tendrils sticking to the strawberry gloss on her lips. She threw the headband at Sophie.

“Wipe yourself off,” Ella ordered. “Then throw it in the creek. I don't ever want to
think
about that headband again.” She shuddered and took a long pull from her cigarette.

“Really,” Sophie said, bunching her unkempt bangs in the cloth and wringing out the water. “I just, I was having this dream, and it was a, a mermaid, and then I needed to drink the water, I—it's so crazy, I don't know why I did that!” Overwhelmed, Sophie weakly flung the headband toward the water and watched it flutter soggily to the stiff,
dead grass, landing beside the jelly blob of a used condom. Both girls averted their eyes.

“Well, I've never heard of that,” Ella said resentfully. “I've never heard of passing out and then getting, like,
possessed
.”

“I know, me neither,” Sophie agreed.

Sophie couldn't count how many times she'd played the pass-out game with Ella, her best and only friend. They played it in their houses when no one was home—rarely at Ella's, with her impossibly large and ever-expanding family. They played it in the public bathrooms that no one ever used at the back of the mall, locked in the handicapped stall. They played it behind the dumpsters in the mall parking lot, they played it on the railroad tracks, each girl taking a turn, the one spotting the other, watching her tip her head over, Ella's long, perfect hair sweeping forward like a silk curtain; Sophie's scrunched in snarls like underbrush tangled with briars and thistle. The huffing and the puffing, the head coming back, hands squeezing the sides of the throat, breath held deep in the lungs, and then… up, up and away. How their bodies would tenderly collapse, one girl catching the other, the enchanted one drifting away into a dream like a backward fairy ring, into a place where time stalled and chugged and stalled again, so that when she came to, her body ringing with tingles, it felt as though a year had passed instead of scarcely a minute.

Sophie and Ella used to do all kinds of things. Sophie, a storyteller, would create a strange and wonderful tale and Ella would draw pictures with markers and together they would make a book. At the Salvation
Army in the city square they would hunt through the dingy toy bin in search of naked and unloved Barbies, talking the clerk down from a dollar to fifty cents, and bring the doll home, where they would scrub her and untangle her synthetic locks and restore her to her proper Barbie beauty. They would play board games and watch the rerun television shows of other eras—
The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy
—long into the night. But lately Ella had deemed most all activities either gay or retarded, choosing instead to practice smoking in a stylish manner and playing pass-out. Sophie could feel a new energy around her friend, as if a part of her that had been shut off was plugged in and humming, emitting a forcefield. She seemed tougher, colder, both more in your face and farther away. She seemed, Sophie realized as she watched her friend watch her through the haze of smoke that hung, clotted in the humid air, like she just didn't like her anymore. She tried to see herself through her friend's eyes. Her grubby clothes, her bleeding mouth, the hair she couldn't be bothered to brush. Where Ella wore smudges of color on her face, Sophie wore dirt. Shame rose in her like mercury up a thermometer, and she shook the thought away. What did
she
think of Ella? Ella, whose mean streak once was such a guilty pleasure, the witty way she eviscerated dumb boys and dumber teachers, mimicking her fussy aunts, lacerating
any man on the street foolish enough to make a kissy-kissy noise at her—the streak had widened, become a harsh swath, and it was aiming itself right at Sophie. Sophie felt something twitch inside her, as if she could flex a magic muscle and find herself inside her friend's thoughts, inside her heart. She felt close to Ella in a way that felt wrong, and dangerous.
Crazy
.

Ella flinched. “Stop
looking
at me like that! You are getting more and more loco, Sophie. It's getting weird, okay? You got to get it together, 'cause I can't handle crazy shit like this.” She shook her head firmly, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“It cuts off oxygen to your brain, passing yourself out,” Sophie said quickly, deflecting the blame from her, her increasing strangeness, her inability to
get it together
, and onto the game. “It messes with the chemicals in your blood, it's like we're giving ourselves seizures.”

“No it's
not
,” Ella said. “Nerd. Where did you hear that?”

“The internet.”

“Nerd. Were you googling ‘passing out'?”

“Yeah, basically. I mean, why do you think everything happens? It's 'cause we're messing with ourselves. You know there's a girl who passed out and never came back? She's in a coma.”

“Liar,” Ella quipped, lighting a new cigarette off the butt of the old.

“You're chain-smoking.”

“So. You just drank
the creek
. If we are in a cancer race I'd say you just
leaped
ahead,
biiiiitch
.” Ella had a way of saying
biiiiitch
that made Sophie crack up. And Sophie had a way of cracking up that made Ella
crack up. The pair had spent so much time goading one another into hysterics, much to the annoyance of the world around them, which hardly ever thought they were funny. The burst of laughter that erupted out of them was such a relief to Sophie that she reached out to grab her friend by her newly shaved leg. Like a hammer had tapped the dip in her knee, Ella kicked out defensively, sending a spray of dirt over Sophie, to stick muddily to the wetness of her t-shirt.

“Don't
touch
me, okay?” Ella snapped, backing away. “You
know
, Sophie, don't you touch me, I don't know what you got now.” Ella rubbed her legs together like twin sticks seeking fire, trying to chafe away whatever contaminant she imagined Sophie had left on her.

Sophie's laughter stopped short, and she drew her hands back, stuffed them beneath her, her butt in terry-cloth shorts pressing her palms to the dirt. There were things about having a body that were extra hard on her friend. Sophie didn't get why it had to be that way, but that's how it was. It was like the world was filled with microscopic particles of filth and grime that no one but Ella could see. To Ella, bacteria, the seeds of catastrophe, the seeds of disease, lurked on toilet seats, on forks and spoons, in the air that breezed across her body. She had made a certain peace about living in a world filled with contaminants, and considered it an accomplishment that she was able to brave such filthy places as the creek bed and the mall bathroom, though if not for the blissed-out promise of the pass-out game, she'd never be able to stand it. Ella imagined her skin like a length of sponge, thirsty to soak things into her. She took lots of baths
and lots of showers, and was very particular about the food she ate. Sometimes she would just get it in her head that a piece of vegetable was contaminated, or start tripping out about what the animal on her plate might have eaten in life—had it eaten poison? Bugs? Had it eaten the poop of other animals? By eating it, wouldn't Ella be eating poison and bugs and the poop of other animals? She would push her plate away, refusing to eat. No one could convince her otherwise.

Sophie wondered if something was wrong with
her
for not paying more attention to all the germs and bacteria out there, but she really couldn't get herself to care about that. The world seemed fine, and evil bacteria, though she knew it existed, just wasn't comprehendible. Doctors had cures for most everything, anyway. What she didn't understand was how Ella could smoke cigarettes, but to Ella cigarettes were different. Having grown up in a house of smokers, cigarettes were the atmosphere. Though they created their own problems, they were in a different category from bacteria, germs, and filth. But most importantly, smoking made the wild tangle of fear inside her smoother. She didn't know how it worked, but it did. And it made her feel fearless to do it—tough, invincible, immortal. A nice way to feel when you're a girl convinced in her heart that she is bound to encounter an invisible pearl of E. coli, a splash of Ebola, a flea full of plague. Leaning against the back of a warehouse by the train tracks, a pilfered cigarette in her hand, Ella could relax into the notion that at the very least she
looked
hard, together, really
Chelsea
. Even if on the inside she was all bunched up with fear.

“I'm going home,” Ella said, frantic, crouching low to examine her leg as if Sophie's gentle touch had left a bruise, drawn blood. “You don't even know what I am going to have to do to deal with this. You have no freaking idea.” Ella's voice rang out angrily. “And snap out of it! You're bugging me out. It's like you're more brain damaged than ever.”

The insult stung Sophie, as it was intended to. Had her friend suggested she was newly brain damaged? Well, after sipping from the toxic creek, how could she be blamed? But
more than ever
? Had Ella
always
thought Sophie was brain damaged? She thought about the cruel way Ella could speak of others—fucking
retarded
—and imagined the words meant for her, felt tears spring to her eyes and plop down her face. She sucked the droplets into her mouth, grateful for the comfort of a salt that was safe, clean, her very own.

* * *

ELLA RAGED TOWARD
the torn chain-link fence that did a poor job keeping the kids who lived in the nearby housing projects away from the water. The ripped-away metal was eaten through with rust; no one paid attention to this part of the city. It was possible no one paid attention to the city at all. It was that kind of place—far from the New England of sailboats and lobsters, checkered tablecloths on picnic tables, lighthouses, wooden toboggans to sled down a hill in winter, frozen, snow-dusted ponds for ice-skating. Chelsea was none of that. It was flocks of dirty pigeons and dented old cars; fish sticks
with freezer burn and fast-food drive-throughs; scuffed, neglected parks, trash-strewn train tracks and a putrid creek. It made sense that Sophie and Ella enjoyed the pass-out game as much as they did; the world of the dream state was so much nicer, prettier, and more magical than the city they spent their days in.